Wainuiomata High School
Wainuiomata High School is a state co-educational secondary school situated in Wainuiomata, a suburb of Lower Hutt, New Zealand. The school was founded in January 2002 from the merger of Wainuiomata College and Parkway College. A total of 835 students from Years 9 to 13 (ages 12 to 18) attend the school as of April 2013.HistoryIn the early 2000s, the entire state school network in Wainuiomata was reviewed by the government under the direction of Minister of Education Trevor Mallard. At the time, Wainuiomata had two secondary schools, Wainuiomata College and Parkway College . Both had declining roll numbers - Wainuiomata College had 450 students and Parkway College had 350 students in the 2001 school year - and their facilities were underutilised. It was decided to rationalise the two secondary schools by merging them to form a new single secondary school, Wainuiomata High School, on the Parkway College site. The merger took effect in January 2002.Although the Parkway site was under-utilised, the combined 800 students exceeded the school's capacity and required relocatable classrooms to be moved on site to deal with the extra students. Government funding saw a new five-classroom "social sciences" block open in early 2004 as a permanent solution.. However, the school's roll soon increased to 940 students, requiring the relocatable classrooms to remain.The old Wainuiomata College site was abandoned, and in 2005, it was used as the filming location for the first series of school-based comedy Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby. Much of the old school was destroyed in an arson attack in July 2010.
